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OPINION

Bryant is hiding behind the brave

Published 10:47 a.m. CT May 22, 2015

Steven Shryock, center, holds a sign that reads “war,” as other protesters represent the Occupy Wall Street movement on Sept. 17, 2013, at Zuccotti Park in New York. Mississippi NAACP Executive Director Derrick Johnson says the Occupy Wall Street movement is the resistance to decades of political shift favoring big corporations and their executives and shareholders over workers. Bebeto Matthews/AP(Photo: AP)

The Mississippi NAACP is outraged at Gov. Phil Bryant’s latest attempt to link recent, cowardly acts of brutality against members of law enforcement with growing national frustration over police violence against unarmed individuals and general resentment of a lop-sided economic recovery.

In an op-ed piece in Sunday’s Clarion-Ledger, Bryant claimed “the criminal class, gangs and organized destructive movements, such as Occupy Wall Street,” are “tak(ing) advantage of tragic confrontations to bring attention to their cause.”

The Occupy Wall Street movement is resistance to decades of political shift favoring big corporations, their executives and shareholders over workers. Wall Street managers and executives have trampled every attempt at raising workers’ wages, so most economic gains instead fuel corporate profits and higher returns for shareholders and executive pay raises.

American youth — the fuel of Occupy — were horrified to watch their families’ savings evaporate in 2008, and were devastated when Wall Street wrongdoers, who helped usher in the Great Recession by bundling and selling bad mortgages and other acts of greedy malfeasance, were deemed too important and powerful to prosecute by our own attorney general. Real democracy can’t exist in a country where some people are more valuable than others.

Also powering the Occupy Wall Street movement were citizens who were concerned that almost all economic gains since the 2008 collapse appeared to be going to the 1 percent of the U.S. population with the highest incomes. Even today, the economic gains of the top 1 percent grew by 34.7 percent while the bottom 99 percent experienced only a 0.8 percent gain.

Bryant also fails to accurately summarize the “turbulent ’60s and ’70s,” when “police officers were called ‘Pigs’ and often portrayed in movies as corrupt and racist,” while “violent criminals such as the Weathermen and even the Hell’s Angels were romanticized as simply anti-establishment.” Bryant claims “these criminal class movements were brought to an end by federal, state and local law enforcement working together across jurisdictional and political lines to restore order.”

The governor refuses to acknowledge the economic desperation that was the basis of much of the social unrest of the ’60s and ’70s, as impoverished blacks and low-income whites struggled to obtain financial equality. We only briefly managed to secure a path toward economic parity before the nation’s leaders again began to devote themselves to the wealthy in the 1980s, beginning a long relapse into disparity between the haves and the have-nots plain on every economic chart since.

Like those dedicated national leaders who have sworn to diminish the wealth of the working class and bolster the extravagance of the 1 percent, our own governor is blind to the economic issues plaguing his own state. He ignores the fact his beloved Mississippi remains at No. 50 among the states on most issues, except diabetes, poverty and teen pregnancy. He bravely touts his economic vision, but ignores the net loss of 46,000 jobs since he took office. He beats his chest as the Nissan plant in Canton expands production but doesn’t care that it fills its ranks with temporary workers who are not assured employment at the end of the year and can make no plan for their future, and who fear to open a mortgage or invest in their communities.

We are saddened by the recent tragedy in Hattiesburg and are assured authorities there will hold those responsible accountable to that heinous act of violence. Mothers who have lost sons in acts of police brutality want the same swift justice. We applaud the state attorney general’s office for the arrest of Bolivar County Deputy Walter Grant in the fatal shooting of Willie Bingham in 2013.

The Mississippi branch NAACP hopes Bryant will come to understand the real battle lines are not between an overblown “criminal class” and police, but between poverty and the rest of us.